Bitcoin Cash

What is Bitcoin Cash?

Bitcoin Cash is created on 31 August 2017 during a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain. Did you hold any Bitcoins in a wallet before 31 August 2017? That means you have the same amount of Bitcoin Cash after the hard fork.

You can claim Bitcoin Cash by inserting your private wallet key into the official Bitcoin Cash wallet. In most cases, exchanges already created a Bitcoin Cash wallet for you online (if you had any Bitcoins in online wallets).

Bitcoin Cash is an exact copy of Bitcoin but with two major differences:

Mining algorithm

Bitcoin Cash uses the POW (Proof of Work) algorithm. That means you need specific hardware to mine Bitcoin Cash. ASICs are optimized miners to mine Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash. Or any other coin with the SHA-256 algorithm.

It’s not profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash on your own unless you have massive amounts of hashing power and can afford the power bills that come with it. At this time of writing, it is more profitable to mine Bitcoin over Bitcoin Cash. But this can change anytime. You can see check the profitability at Coindance.

Bitcoin Cash circulation and block info

Bitcoin Cash has the same algorithm as Bitcoin. Since BCH is a direct copy of Bitcoin, the hard coded features cannot be changed. For example, there will be 21 million Bitcoin Cash. Also, the block rewards and block time remains the same.

But because there are way more miners mining Bitcoin, statistics will change over time. At the moment of the hard fork, there was exactly the same amount of Bitcoin Cash in circulation as there were Bitcoins. At this time of writing, there are 16,548,187 Bitcoins in circulation. But there are 16,563,113 Bitcoin Cash in circulation.

This is possible because Bitcoin Cash has a lower mining difficulty. That means blocks are found in a faster rate. That does not mean mining Bitcoin Cash is more profitable. This all depends on the current price.

What can you do with Bitcoin Cash?

Bitcoin Cash is used as a currency. But most people only use them for trading and speculation.